44 Years Ago Today, An Iconic ’80s Movie Day Changed Hollywood Forever (But Both New Films Bombed)

The careful curation of a movie’s release date by Hollywood has turned into almost a scientific expertise by the studios. Not only are flags planted years in advance by the likes of Warner Bros. or Disney to stake the claim for a specific day two or three years in the future, as a sign that anything else should make way for a sometimes untitled major release. If you’re opening a new Spider-Man movie on a date in July, every other studio wants to know so they can avoid it. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it backfires, but picking release dates is now a bigger deal than just throwing darts at the board.

Previously, though, picking release dates while considering the other films that were coming out that same weekend wasn’t that big of a deal. Though the modern box office and Hollywood accounting put the utmost importance on the opening weekend, the long run of movies in the past meant that even a bad opening weekend wasn’t the end. Even twenty years ago, films would play for months on end, sometimes over a year, generating box office revenue that entire time. One weekend in 1982, though, 44 years ago today, actually, on June 25, 1982, Warner Bros. released Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and Universal released John Carpenter’s The Thing. Though these two movies may be beloved classics now, perhaps making fans consider the iconic ’80s movie day they created together, at the time, it was a disaster.

Blade Runner & The Thing Opened on the Same Day in 1982

The path for both Blade Runner and The Thing making their way to the big screen on the same weekend is distinct, not only because the two films would go on to be box office bombs that fundamentally changed Hollywood, but because the filmmakers themselves were traveling on nearly identical roads. Both Ridley Scott and John Carpenter had been wunderkind filmmakers who delivered major hits, Alien for Scott and Halloween for Carpenter (though he also already had The Fog and Escape From New York under his belt as well). The two movies marked high-profile projects for both directors, which made their “failure” at the time surprising.

For Blade Runner, the film was originally met with a mixed reception, with some critics panning it for putting the spectacle of its special effects over the story itself. Legendary critic Pauline Kael called it a “suspenseless thriller” and said the film was “a victim of its own imaginative use of hardware and miniatures and mattes,” even adding, “At some point, Scott and the others must have decided that the story was unimportant.” Though the film had a decent opening weekend, $6.1 million, it hit a ceiling of $27.5 million domestically, which stood just below its production cost of $30 million.

With The Thing, things were even worse. Critics largely hated the movie, not only for its tone, but also for the graphic violence that was at the center of its practical special effects. Legendary critic Roger Ebert award the movie two-and-a-half out of four stars, calling it “a great barf-bag movie” but adding he was “disappointed” and that “this material has been done before, and better, especially in the original.” Scott Cain of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote that the film was “Such a pity” and that John Carpenter “is too gifted a moviemaker to let nauseating special effects take over his biggest film.” In the end, The Thing would gross just $3.1 million in its opening weekend before limping its way to $20 million total, just above its $15 million budget.

The wild thing for both movies is that their release dates not only offered ’80s movie fans an iconic day to go see two future classics at the exact same time, but they were also just two of several other incredible movies playing in the theater too. The same weekend that Blade Runner and The Thing opened, movie fans could also find themselves watching Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Rocky III, Poltergeist, Annie, Conan the Barbarian, and even a re-release of Disney’s Bambi. The amount of choice available at one time feels staggering now, especially when films are out of theaters within weeks of opening in the modern era.

There was also a complete buzzsaw that ran through both Blade Runner and The Thing that neither saw coming, a film that fundamentally altered ’80s movie culture and left audiences totally uninterested in seeing grim and dark movies, especially ones with evil aliens, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Not only could you also see E.T. the same weekend that Blade Runner and The Thing opened, but most people did, as Spielberg’s classic won the weekend with more than double Blade Runner‘s haul (more than four times The Thing‘s).

Two of the ’80s Big Bombs Totally Changed Hollywood in One Weekend

As movie fans are well aware now, though, the critical lashing that both Blade Runner and The Thing took in their opening weekend, along with the dismal commercial success, the audience found them both. For both films, they quickly developed a cult following from fans of the genre, with appreciation for both growing with their releases on home video, which became the place for films that bombed at the box office to eventually find their audience.

Over time, the two films cemented their place as classics in their respective genres, with Blade Runner being inducted into the United States National Film Registry just eleven years after its release date in 1993. For what it’s worth, The Thing was selected for inclusion just last year, meaning both are now present.

The real tell that these two box office bombs that were met with daggers by critics at the time, though, is the influence they have had on films in the years since their release. The likes of the Ghost in the Shell franchise don’t exist without Blade Runner, nor does Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy. Without The Thing, TV shows like Stranger Things aren’t around, and Oscar-winning directors like Guillermo del Toro are without a major inspiration for practical monster effects.

The real tell that both Blade Runner and The Thing overcame the box office and critical woes of their release, however, is that the adoration they’d achieved with audiences later saw the studios see dollar signs. Though once considered failures, eventually the fandom that had built around them gave way to modern follow-ups.

In 2011, Universal released a prequel to The Thing, also called…The Thing, which was ironically also met with critical disdain and box office woes, but for the exact opposite reasons as the original (one big one being that the prequel utilized CGI effects rather than practical creations). Even now, Universal Studios and Blumhouse Productions have been talking about a potential legacy sequel or remake of Carpenter’s film.

Blade Runner also got a sequel, with 2017’s Blade Runner 2049, which was directed by Denis Villeneuve and brought back Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard. Though the film made over $270 million at the global box office and was nominated for five Academy Awards, it was still seen as a box office disappointment. That said,

All this is to demonstrate that box office failure and even critical derision are not the end of the story for any movie, because 44 years ago today, two films arrived as lame ducks at the box office and with film critics. Now, they’re two of the best of all time. Not every movie that bombs and gets bad reviews can join this club, though, but sometimes, lightning strikes way later than anyone can predict.